City expected to keep contract with law firm

The
city’s contract for tax collection services is on the agenda today, an item
expected to continue the city’s business relationship with the mayor’s law firm
for at least another year.

The
meeting includes a work session that begins at 3 p.m. and will consider the
construction contract for the new animal shelter and give the City Council a
peek under the hood of the 2013-14 budget.

The tax
collection contract has been scheduled as a consent agenda item for the regular
meeting, which begins at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall.

The city
staff has recommended to the City Council that Denton continue to contract with
Sawko & Burroughs for tax collection services.

A Denton
law firm in which Mayor Mark Burroughs is a partner, Sawko & Burroughs has
been the city’s tax collector since 2005.

The city
has two performance benchmarks as part of its agreement with the firm. The firm
is required to collect at least 60 percent of the past-due bills for the
current year and 30 percent of the money that is past due for more than one
year.

The city
collects about $45 million in property taxes each year, with about $750,000
referred to collection annually, city records show.

Collections
in the year after the economic collapse in 2008 were the worst in recent
history, with more than $990,000 getting turned over to the firm for
collection.

As a
general rule, many tax bills are paid soon after they are turned over for
collection, according to Assistant City Manager Bryan Langley.

“Those
that go unpaid for more than a year usually have some complication, such as a
bankruptcy, that affects collection,” Langley said.

As of
April 30, the city had about $1.2 million in unpaid property tax bills, about
20 percent being taxes that became past due in 2011 and were referred to the
firm in 2012, city records showed.

From 2006
to the present, the firm has had varying degrees of success in collecting
past-due bills that are a year old.

The best
year was 2006, with nearly 75 percent collected, city records showed. For the
past three years, the firm has collected an average of about 65 percent of tax
bills that are a year past due.

For more
protracted collection battles, the firm’s best success again was in 2006, with
nearly 46 percent of old accounts paid. In the past three years, that has
dipped to an average of about 37 percent of old accounts.

In his
memo to the City Council about the matter, Langley wrote that any difference
between the current firm and a potential new firm, specifically their
collection performance and procedures, was “minimal.” State law is written that
the city and other taxing entities will eventually be paid the tax, interest
and penalty due, “it’s just a matter of when,” Langley said in an interview
Monday.

The
city’s largest outstanding property tax bill, by far, sits with the owners of a
shuttered radioisotopes plant, Langley said. The firm, representing both the
city and the school district, along with another firm representing the county,
filed suit to collect those taxes in 2008. According to county tax records, as
of June 6, NuView Molecular Pharmaceuticals Inc. still owes more than $600,000
in property taxes, interest and penalties, dating from 2007. About $142,000 of
that is owed to the city.

Two trial
dates scheduled for this year have been delayed, court records show. The first
continuance, in March, included a deadline for a partial tax payment and a new
trial date in June. A second continuance was granted June 5.

Denton
attorney Michael J. Whitten, who represents NuView, said that his client has
struggled for several years to try to get financing arranged to reopen the
plant.

“My client, over the past several months, has raised some money and
twice made payments on the tax bills,” Whitten said.

There is
still hope to raise enough financing to restart the business and pay the entire
bill in full, Whitten said. Otherwise, his client plans to continue to chip
away at what is owed, he said.

Burroughs
said his firm would rather that the taxes be paid in full than in a payment
plan, but they have been encouraged by the progress made in the past several
months.

Although
the tax collection contract began after Burroughs finished his third term on
City Council and before he was elected mayor, the contract has been a source of
controversy. Burroughs, who cannot run for re-election next year because of
term limits, has said the arrangement poses no conflict of interest for him,
since the firm collects its fee — an amount limited by state law — directly
from delinquent taxpayers.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at
940-566-6881 and via Twitter at @phwolfeDRC.

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